rita anderson

Rita Anderson, an internationally-published and award-winning writer, has an MFA Creative Writing and an MA Playwriting. Rita is Dramatists Guild Regional Rep, and she went on scholarship to The O’Neill. Her play, Frantic is the Carousel, was the National Partners American Theatre nominee, and Rita won the Ken Ludwig Playwriting Award, the top national prize from The Kennedy Center for “Best Body of Work.” She has had over 100 productions and as many literary publications to include APPLAUSE’s BEST NEW 10-MINUTE PLAYS (in 2019 and again in 2020) and in their BEST NEW WOMEN’S MONOLOGUES (years 2019 & 2020) and with SMITH & KRAUS too. Early Liberty, Final Conversations, and The 27 Club (www.offthewallplays.com) are on the “Best Selling Plays” list, and Next Stage Press published her comedy, Woman Hollering Creek, which is also a “runaway Best Seller.” Rita has had work developed with The Kennedy Center, The 24-Hour Plays Project, HBMG Foundation and Creede Repertory Theatre (CRT), The PlayGround Experiment (NYC), The Barrow Group (NYC), Mildred’s Umbrella (Museum of Dysfunction), Moving Parts Theatre (Paris, France), and she was a pilot playwright for Hyde Park Theatre Writers’ Group. Rita is Faculty at Interlochen, but the highlight of her emerging career so far was sitting on a playwriting panel with Christopher Durang. Both of Rita’s poetry books: The Entropy of Rocketman (Finishing Line Press) and Watched Pots (A Lovesong to Motherhood), have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

WEBSITE AND SOCIAL MEDIA:
Website: http://www.rita-anderson.com
Facebook: Rita Anderson
Instagram: rita_anderson2
Linked In: Rita-Anderson

MORE ABOUT ME:
I'm an omnivorous reader and I read across all disciplines; this enriches, not only my mind & soul, but the "reach" of my skills as a playwright. I love to take difficult concepts and make them accessible, thereby growing the audience's frame of reference too. I am passionate, too, about writing genre-bending scripts that mash-up thrillers with video game or devised options etc, and I am most interested in writing the play I have not yet written, rather than simply returning to the well to drop the dipper down into the same "formula," over and over again. I am interested in growth and work to be a lifelong learner.

WHAT I'M WORKING ON:
I am always straddling multiple-projects simultaneously. For example, I recently completed my first STEM play with an all-female+ cast, LIGHTNING GIRL! LIGHTNING GIRL! is also a "green" play with a neurodivergent narrative that uses surreal storytelling, including two Shapeshifters. And I just wrote a short play-with-movement about quarantine, called #pandemicdiaries (A Mostly-True Story), and I have started a new full-length comedy called, GHOST NOTES.

KEYWORDS:
​LGBTQIA, Thriller, Political, Nature, Pandemic, Climate, Environmental, Historical, satire, dark comedy, Immersive/site-specific, Neurodivergent, Surreal, Absurdist